Comment by greekanalyst
7 months ago
"...the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring."
That's not surprising but also bleak.
7 months ago
"...the LLM group's participants performed worse than their counterparts in the Brain-only group at all levels: neural, linguistic, scoring."
That's not surprising but also bleak.
Appears to align with good old Ironies of Automation [1]. If humans just review and rubber stamp results, they do a pretty terrible job at it.
I've been thinking for a while now that in order to truly make augmented workflows work, the mode of engagement is central. Reviewing LLM code? Bah. Having an LLM watch over my changes and give feedback? Different story. It's probably gonna be difficult and not particularly popular, but if we don't stay in the driver's seat somehow, I guess things will get pretty bleak.
[1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ironies_of_Automation
Didn't realise the pedigree of the idea went back to 1983.
I read about this in a book "Our Robots, Ourselves". That talked about airline pilots' experience with auto-land systems introduced in the late 1990s/ early 2000s.
As you'd expect after having read Ironies of Automation, after a few near misses and not misses, auto-land is not used any more. Instead, pilot augmentation with head-up displays is used.
What is the programming equivalent of a head-up display?
Certainly a relatively tight feedback loop, but not too tight. Syntax errors are very tight, but non negotiable: Fix it now.
Test failures are more explicit, you run tests when you want to and deal with the results.
Code review often has a horrible feedback loop - often days after you last thought about it. I think LLMs can help tighten this. But it can't be clippy, it can't interrupt you with things that _may_ be problems. You have to be able to stay in the flow.
For most things that make programmers faster, I think deterministic tooling is absolutely key, so you can trust it rather blindly. I think LLMs _can_ be really helpful for helping you understand what you changed and why, and what you may have missed.
Just some random ideas. LLMs are amazing. Incorporating them well is amazingly difficult. What tooling we have now (agentic and all that) feels like early tech demos to me.
>What is the programming equivalent of a head-up display?
Syntax highlighting, Intellisense, and the millions of other little features built into modern editors.
1 reply →
> We must negate the machines-that-think. Humans must set their own guidelines. This is not something machines can do. Reasoning depends upon programming, not on hardware, and we are the ultimate program! Our Jihad is a "dump program." We dump the things which destroy us as humans!
https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad